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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28756752">in memoriam</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/snowtagonist/pseuds/snowtagonist'>snowtagonist</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Red vs. Blue</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Gen, Introspection, ive never written tex before so i hope this isnt too ooc, kind of just me playing around with tex and york's characters, no idea how to tag this, set during out of mind, york is dead the whole time so. whoops</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-01-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-01-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 04:27:29</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,196</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28756752</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/snowtagonist/pseuds/snowtagonist</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Watching people die is nothing new to Tex, so why is she thinking about it so much this time around?</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>7</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>in memoriam</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>heyooo</p><p>i have a lot of feelings about the freelancers and out of mind in specific. this fic makes very little sense and i am violently aware of that i just wanted to write a bit abt what tex might have been thinking afterwards? don't mind the vague timeline inconsistencies i was not thinking abt canon very much when i wrote this, i miss york. can you tell i miss york.</p><p>anyway i hope this is an alright read! enjoy.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>Tex hasn’t been bothered by death in a long, long time. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>It comes with the territory. You shoot people, they die. You hit people hard enough, they die. You perform any manner of destructive action to the ground they’re standing on, they’re probably going to die. It happens every day and it happens at her hands more often than most people seem to register. So sue her- death is normal. Extra normal to her, really. It doesn’t get under her skin, and when someone dies she doesn’t </span>
  <em>
    <span>care.</span>
  </em>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Which is why she absolutely cannot, for the fucking life of her, figure out why the image of Agent York cold and lifeless on the ground refuses to leave her head.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>She never really spared much of a thought for her fellow freelancers, back in the project- not like she ignored them, or didn’t want to know them, but she is and was a busy woman, and socializing has never been the highest thing on her priority list. The colours of their armour stick in her head more than their faces, but she remembers bits and pieces when she thinks hard enough. Like the smattering of freckles over Wash’s nose that seemed to be constantly changing, depending on the season. Or how many colours South went through with her hair, but she always seemed to settle on pink. Or, well… York’s scar. The one branching out like lightning from his blind eye. The scar he got (stupidly, so stupidly, she can handle herself better than anybody and there was no good reason for him to </span>
  <em>
    <span>do </span>
  </em>
  <span>that) trying to help her in a fucked up sparring match all those years ago.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>She couldn’t see his face when he died.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Maybe that’s for the best. York was always… painfully jovial. As much as she saw of him, at least. A poor excuse for a security specialist if you pointed him at the wrong kind of lock, but a gifted mediator when people weren’t throwing a wrench into his meticulous routine of joke, defuse, move on. He had a stupid, cheesy grin- wide and warm and it made the corners of his eyes crinkle in a way that made him look so damn trustworthy, somehow. It was weird. York was weird. But York was as close to happy as almost any of them got, and Tex has no desire to remember what his face looked like as that last hint of humour bled out of him until he faded away forever.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Her boots pad over the ground, quiet as she can make a several pound suit of power armour. Which in her case, is pretty damn quiet. Her invisibility is up too- can’t be too careful. She can handle anything, but sometimes avoiding a fight is the best way to win.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Maybe her head is also a little clouded. Not terribly- she’s long since learned how to categorize the things she thinks and feels and experiences into ‘helpful’ and ‘unnecessary’, and getting worked up over an old… colleague? Is that the word for someone like York? But whatever the word is, getting all upset over his death falls squarely in the realm of ‘unnecessary’. He was always going to end up like this, anyway. She’s practical, she has a job to do (as she always does), and there’s no time for that kind of nonsense.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>But she is alone. At least for the time being. And it hopefully can’t hurt to mull over things just a little more.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>She’s not… sad. Tex doesn’t get </span>
  <em>
    <span>sad </span>
  </em>
  <span>when people die. Plenty of people she knew have died, and all the people she knows are going to die one day. But there always seems to be an empty space to reckon with- and maybe that bothers her. The remnants of someone. The fact that they’re gone, but not entirely, and they linger in whatever habits she might have picked up from them, whatever belongings they left behind, the recollection of who they were- and they’re always going to be just that static idea, now, without a life to live and grow and change through. It would be easier if people just evaporated. If they didn’t leave anything behind.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>What did York leave, she wonders? She never knew him well, the two of them operating on different pages of different books more often than not, even if he seemed to be good at getting through to most people. God, he talked </span>
  <em>
    <span>so much. </span>
  </em>
  <span>It would have been annoying- well. Sometimes it </span>
  <em>
    <span>was </span>
  </em>
  <span>annoying. There’s a time and place for silence, and York never quite found it. But it would have been a hell of a lot </span>
  <em>
    <span>more </span>
  </em>
  <span>annoying if it weren’t for the fact that all his ego and bluster and joking around was so obviously meant as a buffer between his team and whatever the hell they were facing down. As much as she can’t stand idle chatter, that’s something she has to give some degree of begrudging respect to.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>It’s strange. To be thinking about a dead man like this. She should really just move on- confine Agent New York to the past, only remember him when he’s mentioned or something reminds her of his gold and silver armour or his ridiculous smile or all the jokes he cracked about his bad eye, like he didn’t even care that someone on his own team hurled a live grenade at him.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>
    <span>It’s been a weird year, </span>
  </em>
  <span>she thinks to herself, as if her entire life hasn’t been made up of weird years and weirder days. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Maybe the fact that he still had Delta is what’s throwing her off. Still bickering with his ai like an old friend, running calculations by them as he worked, like an extension of himself, but another person too. She didn’t- </span>
  <em>
    <span>doesn’t </span>
  </em>
  <span>understand how anyone can work like that with somebody else in their head. Then again, York had a lot of practice- and her own ai wasn’t exactly standard.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Delta is an enigma of their own- one she isn’t interested in dwelling on right now. Their last decision rings in her ears like a gunshot gone astray, looping around her until she's tangled up in confusion and she can almost see their green holographic form swaying in her mind's eye. They wanted to stay with York. They’d wanted to stay with York and presumably </span>
  <em>
    <span>die, </span>
  </em>
  <span>in whatever way an ai can, rather than jump ship and keep going. Almost illogical. Not the way she’d expected Delta to act at all. The world just keeps finding new ways for people to confuse her today.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The thought strikes her that she doesn’t actually know how long she’s been walking. How far astray she might be.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>She checks her coordinates, readjusts her HUD, cocks her gun as if to make sure it’s still there. Like a well oiled machine. Like she’s supposed to do. She’s off track, but not by much. At least this whole thing hasn’t addled her brain too badly.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>And if, as she turns on her heel, her thoughts are still filled with flashes of bloodstained gold and silver and faintly glowing green, she doesn’t think about it.</span>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>thank u for reading... you can find me on tumblr as chaotic-solutions!</p></blockquote></div></div>
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